Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 35. Working with Form Data

After you get a handle on creating form fields, as covered in Chapter 34, you'll want to know some things about managing data to help economize your efforts when working with distributed forms and performing routine calculations on data fields. When forms are completed, you have the option of printing a form, compiling form data distributed via emails or your Acrobat.com account, or sending the data off to a form server product that processes the field data. In this chapter, I cover data management from calculating field data to importing, exporting, and submitting data, and compiling data using the new Acrobat.com features in Acrobat 9.

As is the case with most of the content in Chapter 33, this chapter is also targeted at users working with Adobe LiveCycle Designer as well as Acrobat. Most of what is covered in this chapter can be handled by Designer, however, if you're a Macintosh user or you want to do some editing in Acrobat, what follows is strictly related to working with data and form fields in Acrobat Standard, Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended. Furthermore, the content is restricted to using Acrobat tools and commands for data management. No discussion on using server products, other than a brief explanation about additional products you can acquire, is covered in this chapter.

For Windows users, if you need to with other data systems the best opportunity you have when working with form data is to create your form designs in Adobe LiveCycle ...